Two weeks ago, the New York Times ginned up a controversy over Zohran Mamdani’s college application. In his senior year of high school, Mamdani applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American. He made a point of specifying that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda.
Mamdani’s opponents, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system of higher ed for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was black and Asian American.
Peter Beinart has an excellent video out this morning, which puts the story in Mamdani’s family context — and makes me think there is an interesting parallel between the pseudocontroversy over his college application essay and the pseudocontroversy over the “globalize the intifada” phrase.
As Beinart points out, not only did most if not all of the commentators on the college application controversy completely overlook the facts of Mamdani’s family story but they also failed to elucidate the meaning of that story to Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani was born in Uganda, to a father, Mahmood Mamdani, who was part of a family of Gujarati Muslims from India that had settled in what is now Tanzania and then moved to Uganda when Mahmood was two years old. The Mamdani family firmly identified with being African. It was critical to their family story, particularly when Idi Amin kicked out people of Indian descent from Uganda, including Mamdani’s family, claiming that because they were not black, they were not African.
If you’ve ever seen Mississippi Masala, which I saw when it came out in the early 1990s and recently rewatched, it tells that story with great poignancy and humor, and of course it was made by Zohran’s mother and Mahmood’s wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair. Mahmood also has written at length on the…
Auteur: Corey Robin
